>But I must caution you, I am still looking for the program that runs in
>the background of my computer that prevents me from running scandisk in
>surface scanning mode on a 2GB system disk. This program writes something
>to the hard disk on a periodic basis that forces scandisk to restart with
>the file and directory checking. In another case, I also found by
>accident a (registration prompting) process started by a Hp program that
>terminated normally and the process never showed up in the close process
>screen (Control-Alt-Delete). My point is that nothing is guaranteed to be
>simple in Windows.

I had the same problem. When I turned off ScreenSaver and EnergySaver
settings I was then able to run ScanDisk.